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GEA's 2006 Consensus Conference on Educational Scholarship

New Forms of Scholarship Require Action Research

The GEA conference was a bold and unprecedented attempt by academic medicine to create standards for evaluating non-traditional forms of scholarship. In this excerpt from "The New Scholarship Requires a New Epistemology," author Donald A. Schön suggests that any new form of scholarship also requires action research.

If teaching is to be seen as a form of scholarship, then the practice of teaching must be seen as giving rise to new forms of knowledge. If community outreach is to be seen as a form of scholarship, then it is the practice of reaching out and providing service to a community that must be seen as raising important issues whose investigation may lead to generalizations of prospective relevance and actionability. If we speak of a scholarship of integration — the synthesis of findings into larger, more comprehensive understandings — then we are inevitably concerned with designing. The scholarship of application means the generation of knowledge for, and from, action.

The problem of changing the universities so as to incorporate the new scholarship must include, then, how to introduce action research as a legitimate and appropriately rigorous way of knowing and generating knowledge.

The challenges of recognizing and rewarding educators has been a long-standing issue among medical educators. With the 1990 publication of Boyer's "Scholarship Reconsidered," in which he reviewed the history of scholarship as the basis for challenging the assumption that research was the only form of scholarship, the discussion regarding how to value educators could be reframed. Boyer's document inspired considerable questioning and debate about what was essential to the scholarly work of faculty and the criteria used to make decisions about promotion and tenure. In 1996, with Glassick et al's publication of "Scholarship Assessed," the criteria for all forms of scholarship was elucidated, providing a firm foundation for discussions about how to review educational scholarship.

With the publication of Scholarship in Teaching: An Imperative for the 21st Century in 2000, building on the work of Glassick and Boyer, the AAMC's Group on Educational Affairs (GEA) embarked upon the Educational Scholarship project. Working with the regional faculty, chairs, and deans, the GEA leadership began a process of building consensus about the kinds of faculty work that should be recognized by the modern medical college as relevant to the institutional mission — work that had been invisible to many promotion and tenure committees because of lack of common standards applicable to all forms of scholarship, including education.

Framing the Challenge

Tom Viggiano, M.D., facilitates "Mentoring-Advising" group discussions at the GEA Consensus Conference in Charlotte, NC

Continuing this work, in February 2006, the GEA brought together over 110 faculty for two days of debate, discussion and reflection, all directed toward creating a consensus on evaluating non-traditional forms of scholarship for faculty promotion and tenure.

After opening remarks by Hafler, Fincher, and Hutchings that provided a context for the conference work, attendees of the AAMC-GEA Consensus Conference on Educational Scholarship set off for their assigned breakout groups to explore the scholarship of curriculum development, teaching, mentoring/advising, educational administration/leadership, or learner assessment. Each of the five breakout groups was lead by a member of the planning committee and charged with defining the forms of evidence and evaluation standards for educational scholarship in their category.

According to M. Brownell Anderson, Senior Associate Vice President of the AAMC's Division of Medical Education, the individual assignments to each group were not randomly made. "The people attending the conference were deliberately assigned to groups to create multiple and broad perspectives in every group," she said.

Ms. Anderson acknowledged that the arrangement was both a "positive and a challenge." The diversity of experience found within each of the groups affirmed the conference's mission to find creative yet workable solutions. The challenge was to find common ground among the diverse and wide-ranging standards that promotion and tenure committee participants, Council of Academic Society representatives, members of the Society of Directors of Research in Medical Education, and assorted deans representing faculty affairs, education, and the medical school, all brought to the conference.

Patricia Hutchings, vice president of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching presented the plenary keynote address. Hutchings was struck by the participants' hard work during the breakout group meetings.

"I felt that it was a group that came together very determined to work hard on a tough issue. I know from talking to some of them that it's not a new issue on their campuses. People came and buckled down and stuck with it," Hutchings said.

Debra Simpson and Ruth-Marie Fincher
Debra Simpson, Ph.D., and Ruth-Marie Fincher, M.D. were lead authors on the 2000 Academic Medicine article that marked the first phase of the GEA project to advance medical education scholarship.

Deborah Simpson, Associate Dean of Educational Support and Evaluation at the Medical College of Wisconsin, chaired the conference planning committee. She co-published a research report in 2004 that documented a decade-long 400 percent growth in the number of medical schools whose promotion packets include portfolio type evidence of a faculty member's excellence in education.

"The categories for scholarly work in education now appear to be well established and the types of evidence accepted by promotion and tenure committees is increasing," Simpson said.

"But the question of what should be recognized as scholarship in the promotion and tenure process needs further elucidation. In our conversations with medical school's 'rank and tenure' chairs across the country most of them say if you give us good evidence we have a way to make that count," Simpson said.

"The challenge is that we do not have a broad consensus regarding what evidence within our established categories should count and how best to present that evidence to promotion and tenure committees in a way that can be effectively evaluated," Simpson said.

The goal of conference was to achieve consensus on these issues beginning within each of the breakout groups and their assigned focus area.

Meeting the Challenge

David Irby, Janet Haffler and Boyd Richardson
David Irby, Ph.D., Janet Haffler, Ph.D., and Boyd Richards, Ph.D. worked late into the night to organize the work of their small group discussion for presentation.

On the second day of the conference, the working groups reconvened to identify those areas around which consensus was achieved and those areas needing further discussion. At the conclusion of the conference, each group was able to reach some consensus on the broader criteria associated with evaluating faculty accomplishments as educators.

Simpson agreed with closing comments by Darrell Kirch, M.D., Dean of Penn State College of Medicine and incoming president of the AAMC, that colleges need infrastructure to support evaluative standards associated with educational scholarship.

"You can't just race ahead and say your going to have to have evidence of this caliber when the infrastructure in our medical schools isn't there to support it," Simpson said.

"For example, if a candidate for promotion has designed a standardized patient assessment, what institutional infrastructure is available to support the psychometric analysis of the assessment instrument? Not all institutions may have the resources that an educator can access to obtain the evidence associated with good education and good scholarship. That's a challenge that must be addressed as we move forward if we are to advance education and educators."

The conference proceedings are being prepared for publication and will be presented during a session at the 2006 AAMC annual meeting in Seattle.

Conference Planning Committee

Janet Hafler, Ed.D., Director of Faculty Development, Harvard Medical School

Ruth-Marie Fincher, MD, Vice Dean for Academic Affairs, Medical College of Georgia

Tom Viggiano, MD, Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Mayo Medical School

David Irby, PhD, Vice Dean for Education, University of California, San Francisco

Boyd Richards, PhD, Director of the Office of Curriculum, Baylor College of Medicine

Gary Rosenfeld, PhD, Assistant Dean, University of Texas Medical School at Houston.

References

Hafler JP, Blanco MA, Fincher RM, Lovejoy FH, Morzinski J. Educational Scholarship. Chapter 14. In: Fincher RM (Ed). Guidebook for Clerkship Directors, 3rd edition. Alliance for Clinical Education. In press.

Rice RE, Scholarship Reconsidered: History and Context. Chap. 1. In: O'Meara K, Rice RE. Faculty Priorities Reconsidered: Rewarding Multiple Forms of Scholarship. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass 2005. Pp. 17-31.

Huber MT, Hutchings P, Shulman, LS. The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Today. Chap. 2. In: O'Meara K, Rice RE. Faculty Priorities Reconsidered: Rewarding Multiple Forms of Scholarship. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass 2005. Pp. 34-8.

Fincher RE, Simpson DE, Mennin SP, Rosenfeld GC, Rothman A, McGrew MC, Hansen PA, Mazmanian PE, Turnbull JM. Scholarship in Teaching: An Imperative for the 21st Century. Acad Med 2000;75:887-894.

Simpson D, Hafler JP, Brown D, Wilkerson L. Documentation Systems for Educators Seeking Academic Promotion in U.S. Medical Schools, Acad Med 2004 79(8):783-90

Boyer E, Scholarship Reconsidered: Princeton University Press 1990.

Glassick CE, Huber MT, Maeroff GI. Scholarship Assessed, Evaluation of the Professoriate. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass 1997.